Romeo must have learned his lesson, because he never again tried to bring the girl to the beret. She let him hold her hand across the bridge, the Mother alongside. Then she always walked up to me alone. I’d play the polka and do my bobbing routine. It got to be a game: She’d smile at me and I’d respond with a couple of little dance steps and a trombone wail. More steps toward me and I’d twirl around. The girl would laugh and put a coin in. I felt like laughing myself, for the first time in years. Unlike my older fans, who seemed almost ashamed to be giving money to a beggar, albeit a musical one, the child looked straight into my face. Her expression, a kind of puckery smile with a flash of her blue eyes, made me imagine that she knew how much those coins meant to me.
On a gray day in April, I was just finishing a set with “La Vie en Rose” when I saw that the child was there, standing a bit in front of the usual bunch of tourists. Next to her was Romeo. No sign of the Mother. His hair was slicked back from his forehead in an expensive cut. My audience was with me; they had clapped to the theme from Can-Can and laughed when I swayed during the refrain of “I Love Paris.” I’d lose them if I played the polka. Instead, I just winked at the child, and she smiled at me. She seemed unperturbed that her mother wasn’t there. One hand held on to the hand of the man, who looked down at her as if he couldn’t believe he’d won her over. Her other hand fiddled with a heart-shaped locket I’d never seen before and that I could tell was gold.
The girl gave me a bill this time, another ten-euro note from Romeo’s wallet, and then they walked up the stairs and into the gardens. As they moved out of view, the man picked her up and whispered something in her ear.
The money flowed in that day. No sooner had one group left after a set than another would form around me, sometimes even before I’d started playing again. By late afternoon, I must have had forty people watching. I treated them to a jazz improv on the trombone, with only the cymbal tracking. I didn’t try that often, but the crowd was with me.
Suddenly, sirens wailed from the gardens. A voice thundered from the public-address system; I couldn’t make out the words. The pah-paw of police cars and fire trucks could be heard in the distance, then on the road above the tunnel. Two uniformed cops raced in from the bridge and rushed up the tunnel stairs, taking them two at a time as the tourists gawked. Just after the cops entered the tunnel, the great grilled gates, the ones that closed the park off from the bridge each evening, began sliding shut.
The tourists scattered in confusion. I could still hear noise from the gardens, but it was a muffled rumble. I was locked outside. This was not convenient: I’d have to drag my stuff along the quay and around the west side of the Tuileries to get to the Metro if I couldn’t cross the park. Where was Tatiana? I had never before seen the gates close early. I began packing up.
There was a rat-a-tat, and one more set of racing footsteps sounded from the bridge. I turned and saw that they weren’t being made by a late cop. The Mother, her face streaked with tears, coat hanging open, lipstick smeared, a cell phone in one hand, ran across the cobblestones in high heels and threw herself against the barred gate.
“My baby! My baby!” It was more a howl than a scream, a noise like no sound I had ever heard. “Let me in!” She hung on the bars as if without them she would melt to the ground.
Two uniformed policemen trotted down the stairs on the other side of the gate and came toward her. I could hear more shouts; someone was ordering that the gates be opened. The cops reached out through the grille and touched her hands. And I could hear some of the words they said to her:
“So terribly sorry.”
“He says he only looked away for a second.”
“We will find the villain who did this, madame.”
MUSIC WAS THE only thing that ever filled me up inside. Even before the memories from my childhood came back and stopped my voice, even before the stairs and the tunnel and the broad river became my only horizons, nothing but music touched the hollow core inside me. That’s why I learned so many instruments. Each one — not just my one-man-band ensemble, but the violin, the piano, the plaintive oboe — gave me a different facet of what others get from normal life. When I played, I felt complete.
But on this day, the day after the child, the day after the Mother stopped being a mother, I was just blowing air and whacking drums. The voice my instruments gave me was an ugly, blaring thing.
I had gone back to the bridge to work. What else was there to do? I played the most melancholy songs of my Edith Piaf repertoire. No polkas. I didn’t even touch the trombone. It seemed unfair that the park was open as usual and that the beret filled up, even though I wasn’t twirling, or bobbing, or smiling. How could those tourists be unaware that my music was crying, not singing? But I couldn’t leave, couldn’t go away from the last place I had seen her.